OSCAR in Alberta: the real deal

I was initially very excited to get OSCAR working for my busy combined medical and surgical clinic in Calgary. The “OSCAR Community” is always helpful with great advice from experienced people, and is an excellent resource.

But what to do when you ACTUALLY want to get stuff done?  How do you go about it?  How do you get OSCAR installed in Alberta, get it working, get support, training, Alberta Health Care billings and Labs?

How do you acquire and configure a server?  How do you assign port forwarding, as well as a static IP addresss for your clinic?  How about a PIA statement so that you can have an EMR?

What if you want to switch from getting totally screwed from Wolf or any of the other numerous proprietary software vendors?

What to do, and how to approach wrestling this monster?

Relax!

You don’t need to know any of that stuff.  You just need to know who to call and you need to expect to pay about $250/Mo for a turnkey solution.

Yes, OSCAR is “open source”, and it can never really get bought/sold/go out of business.

That’s already in the bag.  All other medical software vendors can and will lock you in.  It is part of their business model that they completely control the client-service relationship.  Using a proprietary EMR vendor disadvantages the Physician by requiring them to assume all risks responsibilities and liabilities in the relationship between Physician and Vendor.

Doctors should never submit to controlling and predatory relationships like that.

This is why an open source solution like OSCAR makes the most sense for Doctors.

So is OSCAR free?  Yes.  It is free - much like it is free if you personally scrub your office floors and answer your own telephone lines to book patients.  In the meantime, replace the oil in your car, change over your summer tires to winters and service your fridge when it goes on you.

But your time is too valuable for things like that unless you find one of more of those things to be a pleasantly distracting hobby.

You hire people to take care of the logistical tasks associated with your practice.

Your EMR is a very important and complex practice tool.  Too important and complex for you to mess with on your personal and professional time.  Society at large wants you doing patient care work, not scrubbing floors, fixing cars and fridges or messing around with computer stuff.

Nobody wants a Doctor to be late or a no show because they could not get their car started.  Standards are increasing for Physicians, and EMR's are rapidly becoming necessary tools for Physician to keep increasingly complex patients medically organized and appropriately attended to.

So you need an OSCAR vendor that can takrncare of all the details for you.

That’s the “Easy Button”.  All you need to do is to push it

Two current solutions for getting OSCAR in Alberta:

1) Sign up for JUNO.

JUNO is OSCAR, but they are not an "officially sanctioned" OSCAR Vendor.

In my opinion, this is no big deal in regard to JUNO.  The fact is that the larger Canada-wide OSCAR community that came up with the "officially sanctioned" OSCAR idea, tends to focus on the needs and wants of BC and Ontario OSCAR users.  This is not surprising, as that is where most of the user in the country reside.  But I've been trying to get OSCAR in Alberta since prior to 2009 with no luck at all.  I have to say: JUNO eventually came through and created not only a killer lab module for OSCAR, but also a killer billing module for it.  They also tend to solve any OSCAR problems that pop up from time to time - right away -.  JUNO is not a "fork" from OSCAR, but rather an immediately deployable solution in my opinion.

My experience with JUNO is that they just get things done and rapidly solved without politics, delay or hiccups.  This is critical in an EMR, and at the end of the day, I just don't have any patience for the "OSCAR POLITICS" that seems to have developed in the OSCAR community at large from the perspective of an Alberta OSCAR user.


2) Sign up for NERD

NERD is an excellent OSCAR service Provider for OSCAR in Alberta.  Problem is that they don't, as of yet, have a working Alberta billing or lab module for OSCAR.   If you like, they can possibly arrange a special agreement with JUNO to provide billings/labs through a separate agreement.


Whatever you decide to do, at least you have above some practical solutions that you can employ to get OSCAR working and ready for your Medical office in Alberta.

Feel free to email me if you have any concerns or questions.

Happy Alberta OSCAR User